The Impact of Crime News Coverage on Taiwan's Criminal Policy
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Ko, Hsuan-Ju
Abstract
The analytic method introduced in this dissertation, which refers to the disciplines and subjects of jurisprudence and communication studies, is an inter-disciplinary study. This study intends to explore the interactive effects between crime news coverage, audience, and criminal policy by analyzing how crime news coverage interprets social reality and affects the values and cognitive models of the audience, and by investigating how crime news coverage impacts Taiwan''s criminal policy. What kind of reality of crime and ideology does the crime news coverage reflect? This study concludes that in recent years domestic crime news coverage has been under the influence of news commodification and sensationalism. The market-driven news often emphasizes on lurid and sensational topics and predominantly uses storyboards and human interest news frames. With descriptions unfavorable to suspects, the concept of punitiveness is frequently presented in crime news coverage. The study also explores the effect of crime news coverage on the public attitudes toward punitiveness. Through cultivation, agenda setting hypothesis and agenda building, crime news coverage has a significant mediate effect on public’s impression of crime and punishment, including increasing the fear of crime and personal victimization and reinforcing support for punitive criminal policies. In addition, under the influence of pseudo-individualization, spiral of silence and third-person effect, public opinion on crime and legal punishment is affected substantially by news coverage. Furthermore, the effect of the media on public attitudes toward punitiveness has an impact on domestic legislatures with regards to the creation of criminal policy, and the impact has been strengthened by the rise of penal populism in Taiwan in recent years. With legislatures following public will, the crime coverage actually drives criminal policy. The study concludes that commercial pressures are affecting media news treatment of crime, and that the resulting coverage has a crucial part in forming public attitudes toward punitiveness, and ultimately, the criminal policy.
Subjects
crime news coverage
social constructionism
sensationalism
fear of victimization
moral panic
penal populism
criminal policy
SDGs
Type
thesis